


'Til Death Do Us Part

by satincolt



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-19
Updated: 2014-01-19
Packaged: 2018-01-09 07:38:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1143295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/satincolt/pseuds/satincolt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat comes across blueprints to his hive and finds a room he didn't design buried deep beneath the floors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	'Til Death Do Us Part

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Snatcher](https://archiveofourown.org/works/293895) by [makingtriangles (electricbloo)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/electricbloo/pseuds/makingtriangles). 



> This is my first HS work so... yeah. Woot. Please don't burn me at the stake if I mess the characters up; I tried to get them as canonically accurate as possible. >.> This is heavily inspired by/based off The Snatcher by makingtriangles (electricbloo), which is a fan-freaking-tastic story. Highly recommended!

_Thunk, thunk, thunk…_

The spade makes the same noise every time you bury the blade in the dirt. You keep hacking away at the ground, not quite sure what you’re trying to accomplish. There’s a unicyclar dumping pod off to your left filled with packets of seeds and gardening implements and you realize how stupid this whole venture is. When the hell did you find the time to buy _gardening_ supplies? Why the hell are you trying to garden?

Tracing your long, long train of thought, you eventually arrive at “because she told me to.” What a fantastic fucking reason to start a garden. Because Terezi told you to. Disgusted at your pushover past self, you stand up, brush yourself off, and throw the spade in the dirt.

_Chink._

Wait, what?

You kneel again and start pawing at the dirt around the spade. It’s impossible to see, with your shadow _right_ where the spade is, and the stupid green moon is the only one out; it’s always harder to see with only the green moon. Finally, though, your fingers mash painfully up against a piece of metal. What the actual fuck _is_ that?

It takes a while to find the edges and clear out the dirt around it, but as you wrench it free of the ground, you find out it’s a box. A pretty light box. It looks old, too. Sweeps old; as old as you are, but you look way fucking better than this shitty box. The latch is rusted, so you pop it open with the bent tip of the spade. Musty air puffs out at you and you immediately panic—what if that’s poison to prevent people from stealing it, what if there are spores of a troll-eating fungus in there, what if it’s an alert signal to the Empire—

No, fuck that noise. You, Karkat Vantas, are not going to cry like a grub-fisted days-old wiggler because of an _old box_. You smear your face across your sleeve (you were _not_ crying, jegus, the air made your eyes water) and look inside the box. There’s a cracked, aged roll of loose blue paper inside. In the infamous words of Terezi, this calls for an  1NV3ST1G4T10N!

You spread the paper out on your foodblock table and weight the edges down with skulls of Crabdad’s old kills. Speaking of the old bastard, here he is. Crabdad wanders into the foodblock, chitters at you, looks at the paper, gets a drink, pinches you affectionately, and wanders back out. You massage your arm where he pinched you—it hurt, just a little. Only because you’re moonburned right there.

The mysterious paper turns out to be blueprints of your hive. It’s pretty interesting, but of course you remember all of it. Hell, you remember the day you drew this out, Crabdad’s claw on your hand to steady it and make sure you didn’t do something really fucking stupid, like make a stairway to nowhere or build a door so that it opened up into a wall. You also remember it because _you fucking live here._

The plans are pretty extensive and you’re 98% sure someone neatened them up before handing them over to the carpenter drones, but everything’s exactly like you pl— _wait a sweet, slime-pissing second. There’s a room there you didn’t fucking design._

It’s right here, right under your foodblock, and you most _definitely_ don’t remember designing or authorizing that room. Hell, there’s no way to get to it; it’s under your fucking feet and there’s no door to it. It’s got ventilation and water access and there’s a pretty significant amount of electric pathways routing to it… so it’s habitable, you guess? It looks like a shelter of some sort.

There’s a note on the bottom of the page in the tiniest writing possible in ink that’s almost the exact shade of blue as the paper that mentions the room under the foodblock is reinforced. It’s definitely a shelter. Sweet. Now you have a place to go when the drones come to collect and cull. It’s underground, too, so when they raze your hive after you’ve been taken off-planet or killed, the shelter will be intact. Who the everliving hell thought of that? You hope you did, but your past self really wasn’t that smart. He couldn’t have. Maybe Crabdad did? But then again, your lusus isn’t really the greatest thinker of your time.

You’re thinking too much and it’s getting creepy. Outside, the moon is setting and it’s getting steadily brighter; you have to hurry the fuck up and close all the sunshades before you fry to death.

By the time the sun’s up, your hive is dark as a cavern and you have to turn some lights on. Crabdad’s in your respiteblock, tapping on the wall and clicking to himself. That’s fucking weird.

“Everything okay?” you ask him. He churrs low in his thorax, a reassuring noise, but keeps tapping, moving his claw systematically up and down the wall. That’s really fucking odd and almost not okay. You get changed and crawl into your recuperacoon, drifting off to the high-pitched tapping of your lusus’s claws against the wall.

You’re very nearly asleep when Crabdad shrills loudly and hammers his claws against this one spot. Sitting bolt upright and wiping slime out of your eyes, you clamber out of the ‘coon and rush over to your lusus.

“Stop, stop! You’re going to punch a fucking hole in the wall!” You shout over his shrill screeching and try to pull his claws away, but he’s already knocked a chunk of particleblock-board out of the wall and is steadily enlarging the hole. Drawing your sickles, you knock his claws away and tackle him, rolling across the floor of your block. His spines poke you and he flails, screeching and chuffing and clicking angrily.

The fight ends abruptly when Crabdad pins you, showering you with light, scolding blows and angry clicks.

“Alright, I understand! Jegus! You can’t destroy the goddamn wall like that, though, I can’t get the repair drones out here until next perigree!” you protest, pushing him off of you. The two of you stand and stare at the hole Crabdad made. There’s a … channel, a vent, a compartment… you don’t know what to call it. There’s a hollow space behind your wall big enough for a troll to fit in.

“You know something about this?” you ask accusingly, pointing to the hole. Crabdad shakes his head, but chatters and sweeps his claws in a wide gesture, indicating that channel thing behind the wall goes all the way around your block. Holy bug-shitting hell. That is not okay on so many levels.

No, no. You’re being fucking irrational and a cry-wiggler again. It’s probably a heating vent. If it’s a heating vent, though, why is it not leading to the grates in the ceiling that let the hot air out? No, no, _no_. You push that forcibly to the corner of your mind and boot your husktop up.

carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA]

CG: SOLLUX, SOMETHING REALLY FUCKING WEIRD IS HAPPENING AND I REALLY NEED YOU TO LISTEN TO ME RIGHT NOW. 

CG: DON’T FUCKING IGNORE ME LIKE YOU’VE DONE THE LAST TWO DAYS. SOMETHING POSSIBLY DANGEROUS BUT DEFINITELY APE-SHITTINGLY FREAKY IS HAPPENING IN MY HIVE.

TA: fiine, what ii2 iit?

CG: OH THANK TROLL JEGUS. THE LISPY HERMIT DECIDES NOT TO BE A COLOSSAL DOUCHELORD TODAY.

TA: KK, you 2aiid you needed my help. iif you really need my help, 2top iin2ultiing me and cut two the fuckiing cha2e.

CG: ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT. TOUCHY. JEEZ. BASICALLY WHAT’S HAPPENED IS THAT I FOUND SOME BLUEPRINTS TO MY HIVE AND THE BLUEPRINTS HAVE A ROOM ON THEM I DIDN’T DESIGN.

TA: and?

CG: THERE’S A SECRET FUCKING SHELTER UNDER MY FOODBLOCK! CRABDAD’S ACING WEIRD AS FUCKALL AND HE JUST PUNCHED A HOLE IN MY WALL AND THERE IS A FUCKING CHANNEL BIG ENOUGH FOR A REEKING HATE-DAMNED TROLL TO FIT IN. IT GOES ALL THE WAY AROUND MY RESPITEBLOCK. GOD ONLY KNOWS IF THERE ARE MORE THROUGHOUT MY HIVE.

TA: that’2 kiind of creepy, ii gue22.

CG: THAT’S IT? YOU’RE NOT GOING TO GIVE ME ANY ADVICE?

TA: do you want me two?

CG: YES OF COURSE I FUCKING DO. THAT’S WHY I SENT YOU THIS MESSAGE TO BEGIN WITH. I NEED HELP I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO, AND I’M A LITTLE NERVOUS.

TA: 2ee iif you can get iintwo the “2ecret fuckiing 2helter” and 2cope iit out. iit’2 probably nothing. the channel ii2 al2o probably nothing, ju2t a vent for another block the carpenter drone2 ran through your re2piiteblock wall2. iif there’2 an actual ii22ue, ii can come out there or you could get AA or AT two help you.

CG: OKAY. THANK YOU. YOU COULD’VE JUST SAID THAT AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS ASININE CONVERSATION. IF I SEND YOU ANY PANICKED MESSAGES THAT DON’T MAKE SENSE AND CUT OFF SUDDENLY, ASSUME THE WORST AND GET YOUR YELLOW, NO-GOOD, SKINNY ASS OUT HERE STAT.

 

You lean back in your chair and sigh heavily. It’s always draining to have a conversation with Sollux, but it’s good to know he’s got your back if you discover something... unsavory… in the hidden block. Swiveling around, you see Crabdad poking his head into the hole he created.

“No, Crabdad—” you lunge towards your lusus, but it’s too late: he’s already crawled into the channel. “God _dammit!_ ” you hiss, picking your discarded, sopor-crusted sickles off the floor and clambering into the channel after him. The dried slime on your clothes makes it hard to crawl and fills the confined space with fumes that make your head spin. Just ahead, you can see the dim white shape of your lusus rounding a corner.

“Crabdad, you get your stupid, chitinous ass back here!” your enraged whisper doesn’t carry nearly as far as you thought it would and your voice sounds shaky in your own ears. The handles of your sickles grind against the bones of your palms as you crawl further away from the dim mercurial light seeping from your respite block and further into the unknown, musty darkness of the channel.

After crawling for a few minutes and squeezing through tight spots and around corners, you notice the channel growing lighter. If this leads to the outside, you and your lusus are both so fucked, it’s unbelievable. The walls seem smoother here—like they’ve been worn down by something brushing against them repeatedly. The last corner you pass is so rounded and smoothed, it shines in the brightening light. You scare violently as you hear a startled “ _skree!_ ” and a thud.

“Crabdad!” you hurry forwards on hands and knees, ready to lash out with your sickles—and narrowly avoid impaling yourself on said sickles.

Your right shoulder hurts from falling on it, but it isn’t too bad. You look around sharply and get your bearings; the channel you fell out of is only a couple of feet above you in the wall. The room you find yourself in, though, is unlike anything else in your block. This must be it. The Secret Fucking Shelter.

The floor and ceiling are tiled with metal, the walls are—were—blank sheets of metal, but they’re not blank. They’re covered with scrawling writing and diagrams and photographs and _fuck_ , that’s where your old sweater went! It’s pinned up to the wall with several thumbtacks marking areas of it. One wall, the wall with the channel in it, is covered in intricate knots of multicolored wires—the old wires Sollux gave you to fix your husktop—the wires that disappeared one day and you just blamed your lusus’s eccentricities.

Over in the corner, your lusus is investigating the writings and diagrams meticulously.

“Crabdad,” you hiss, trying to get his attention. You slowly draw nearer to him, ducking under some water pipes. “We need to get the hell out of here. Come on,” you tug at your lusus’s arm like you did when you were little and scared. You’re not little any more, but you’re fucking _scared_.

He chitters at you dismissively.

“No, _fuck, come on_ ,” you insist, pulling harder. “I don’t know who or what fucking lives here, but it’s not good and it’s not here right now, so we need to haul ass before it gets back!”

Crabdad goes completely still, examining one line of writing. Then he bolts. With you still attached. He _flies_ through the channel and you scramble behind him. When you emerge in your respiteblock, relieved beyond words to see it’s exactly how you left it, the first thing you do is barricade the hole. Your lusus helps you push your wardrobe and desk in front of the hole, then tack a couple posters over the edges, to hide it.

That day, Crabdad sits outside your ‘coon like a sentinel and you sit inside your ‘coon like a statue, hyperalert. Even though you’re submerged up to your chin in slime, its soporific effects do nothing to quell the red-alert levels of adrenaline pounding through your veins.

Around midday you hear scratching noises above you. Crabdad crawls onto the top of your ‘coon, gives you a miniature heart attack, and puts a reassuringly heavy claw on your head. The scratching disappears within a minute. You spend the next three hours rationalizing the scratching noises when tapping noises start on the back of your wardrobe.

It’s a rhythmic, regular tapping; whatever it is, it’s testing the wardrobe. One of the posters tears. You scream. Your lusus charges, growling and screeching at whatever is trying to get into your block. You plunge under the surface of the slime, which does precious little to dull Crabdad’s aggressive clicks _and the thing growling back at him jegus bugfucking assmaggots on a silver shitplatter._

The horrific screeching and growling stops after a minute or two and you hear Crabdad—oh jegus fuck you hope it’s Crabdad—crawl back onto your ‘coon. You don’t dare move, staying under the slime though your lungs burn and _fuck_ , you really hope you didn’t wet the ‘coon out of terror during that SNAFU. A familiar chittering and grumbling comes from above. Somehow you gather the courage to surface and wipe your eyes.

Predictably, you jump and yell when Crabdad’s face appears right in front of yours, but he checks over you anxiously, stroking your slime-drenched hair and rubbing the bases of your horns. That calms you down a little, but not enough to sleep.

 

Six hours later, just after the sun sets, the very first thing you do is message Sollux.

carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA]

CG: I SURVIVED THE DAY, BUT YOU NEED TO GET THE FUCK OVER HERE RIGHT NOW.

TA: fiine. on my way.

 

It doesn’t take long for Sollux to get here; your hive is in the suburbs at the edge of the city where he lives. He flew over; it’s faster. You lead him straight to your respiteblock and as you begin shoving your heavy-ass wardrobe out of the way, he picks it up and moves it neatly with his show-off fucking psionics.

“Crabdad tore this hole yesterday, and at about three or four in the afternoon, something started tapping on the back of the wardrobe. Crabdad fucking screamed at it and it _growled back at him_. The Secret Fucking Shelter is basically a shrine to whatever hell demon lives in my hive and is creeping on me. It stole some of my clothes and all those wires you gave me and there’s analysis of my schedule and sleep patterns and diagrams of the channel system it made in my hive; I mean _fuck_ , Sollux, I’m going to have to nuke my hive!” you explain to him. He listens with a neutral face, nodding along.

“Can I thee the shelter?” he asks finally.

“Yeah. We’re taking Crabdad with us, though.”

With your lusus leading the way, you crawl through the channel again, back to the Secret Fucking Shelter, your fear increasing exponentially as you go. You manage not to fall on your face as you exit the channel. When you look up, though, your jaw drops. There’s nothing here.

All the writing on the walls, your sweater, the knots of wire—everything is gone. It’s clean as a wiggler after a bath.

“The fuck?” you growl. “It was all here just six hours ago!”

Sollux wanders around the perimeter of the room, trailing his fingers over the walls, kicking the seam where the floor meets the wall.

“There’th nothing here, hidden or otherwithe. Whatever it wath, Crabdad probably thcared it away yethterday,” Sollux says finally, shrugging and jamming his hands in his pockets. “Or it could’ve been a really vivid day terror…”

“No. Fuck that. I was awake the whole goddamn time and I nearly pissed myself with fear. There was something here,” you snap, rolling your shoulders against the prickling feeling of unease running down your spine. “I don’t know how the fuck it would just _disappear_ like this. After that fight, I didn’t hear anything else. There was a ton of shit down here; there’s _no way_ …”

Sollux stands there awkwardly as you trail off into a sputtering, astounded rage. Then he sighs heavily and saunters back towards the channel. “You could alwayth turn this into a pretty cool coding lair or a love-netht for you and your lonelineth to watch romcomth together, _ehehe_.” His nasally laugh, complete with his stupid flickering snake tongue makes you grit your teeth and his word-mangling lisp-supreme makes you want to throttle him.

The entire way through the channel back to your respiteblock, you grumble under your breath and glare at Sollux’s bony behind just inches from your face and contemplate biting it, just to piss him off. You would definitely do it if he wouldn’t liquefy your brains as a psionic startle reflex.

You send him off with a few friendly curses, watching his red-blue halo of psionics fade into the night as he hovers off to the city.

 

The next evening, you wake up and unstick your cheek from your keyboard. Ugh. You’re surprised you actually managed to sleep outside your ‘coon, given how freaked out you were last night. Your block is empty and your lusus is nowhere in sight.

“Crabdad?” you call through the hive. There’s a stirring downstairs and the sound of your lusus coming upstairs. You jiggle the mouse to wake your husktop up while you change into fresh clothes. Where’s Crabdad? You stick your head out into the hall and stop short. Fear surges up in you like a cull-worthy red-blooded tsunami. Stretched across the hall is a huge knot, your lusus standing confused and agitated on the other side.

“Oh _hell_ no,” you choke. “Tear it down!”

Crabdad rips into the knot and you rush to your computer to tell Sollux—pulled up on the screen of your computer is a Grubsoft Word document.

_You can’t stop me, Karkat, I’m already here. I’ve been here forever, I’ve watched you grow up and now you’re mine. Your lusus and your friend can’t stop me. They’ll think you’re insane if you try to tell them I’ve possessed you, I’m inside you, you can’t escape. ‘Til death do us part, Karkat._

You gape silently at the screen, speechless. There are no extant words to describe exactly how mind-fuckingly terrified you are right now. Hot tears roll down your cheeks, nose pricking, face crumpling. Yeah. You’re crying. You just want to curl up in your lusus’s claws and never come out again. Your hive, the place you _designed_ as a safehouse for you and your mind and your cull-worthy quirks of anatomy, is a torture chamber. There’s something living here. A demon, a parasite. It’s inside you. It wants to kill you in a vaguely sexual and very stalkerish way. You can’t tell anybody because it’s right; they’ll think you’re crazy.

“Why?” you sob quietly. “Why did you pick me?” It’s as if you expect an answer on your computer screen. Crabdad scuttles into the room at that moment and rushes over to you, wrapping his chitinous arms around you, rocking and clicking deeply. Blinking away tears, you close the document and message Sollux.

carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA]

CG: IT’S

You pause. What exactly are you going to tell Sollux? What can he do to make it better? This thing is not natural; what can you even do to it?

_You can’t do anything to me, Karkat…_

The last thing you remember is screaming and a laugh, not your own, reverberating inside your skull.

 

Days and nights blur together; you don’t sleep. If you sleep, if you pass out, you wake up to find knots of wires, string, _your own hair_ adorning your hive. You wake up to find batshit insane notes, some written by you, others written by _it_. You wake up to find your lusus hiding in the darkest parts of the hive, snapping at you when you go near him. You wake up to find another piece of your sanity gone.

Your mind is dragging like a broken-down ship. Caffeine only does so much. Before you pass out, you lock your door. That only helps sometimes. It likes to play games, fuck with you and your lusus and your friends. It’s been systematically alienating all your friends. The only contact that remains on Trollian is Sollux. He’s never available.

You pace your respiteblock, staring at the notes written on your hands and arms, mind awash in terror and numb to it. Your fingers start prickling and your eyes water; sure signs you’re about to pass out. Fumbling, you manage to flick the lock on your door and scramble over to your pile. You wait for exhaustion to claim you. You know you’ll wake up in a second or two and have to tally the damages it wrought this time.

You don’t pass out, though. Your eyes keep watering, vision blurring. Your head spins and you find yourself standing up; this’ll make you feel better. You’re walking towards the hole in your wall; it removed the barricades in one day and you had to rebuild them. Fingers—your fingers, rip the posters down and push the wardrobe away. The hole yawns in front of you like the gaping jaws of a monstrous lusus; stale air rushes out at you and stings your dry nose.

Slithering reaches your ears. The _clink-clink_ of claws and that mad tapping grows louder until you’re stumbling back from the hole, eyes wide. Your vision is fucked; everything is trippy colors and the room spins. It’s coming out of the hole and you can hardly look at it. Your eyes hurt when you look at it. You can’t look at it.

The world has taken on a daymarish quality, everything jagged and strained in your skull. Your eyes slide over its face again and pain spears through your head; the world is consumed in jagged keening and black lines and pain. Still, though, it keeps advancing.

It’s impossible; it looks too big for its own skin; it can’t even exist. Its face is so harsh and so lovely; its face is a mess of too many eyes and too many teeth and too much bone and too much for the tiny, tiny space it’s been crammed into. Your eyes are forced away from it again. You stare at the ground near its feet. You can’t see it. When you don’t focus on it, it goes dreamily fuzzy, warping away into the edges of nothingness with the sheer force of how much it shouldn’t exist.

_I’ve been waiting for such a terribly long time to meet you, Karkat._

Its voice is agony. Searing-hot blood drips down your neck. It’s so beautiful, though. It’s beautiful because it makes you suffer; it’s beautiful because it is impossible. It is lovely.

“I…” your voice pants, “I love you.”

_Too bad. I don’t. I may be wedded to you since the day you hatched, but you remember our vows? You remember your promise? To death do us part. I want to leave._

“Of course,” you groan. Of course, of course … of course. You love it, you love it, the walls are spinning and red—your teeth on the floor and claws up your legs; screaming and laughing love beautiful, wonder splits your head, sensation override eyes on hands—scratch jagged world lines—sumptuous—fear love, cry havoc, relinquish wires knots around floor toes screaming their hands too raw is blooded—reality broken—

 

***

 

“Karkat?”

The hive is quiet and dark.

Sollux creeps further into the hive. He jumps when Karkat’s lusus scuttles up to him, frenzied and shaking and looking half-starved.

“The fuck? Crabdad?”

Crabdad chitters and squeals, scrambling to the foodblock and knocking the cabinets with his claws. He’s hungry. What the hell is going on?

Sollux fishes out a bag of crackers the lusus should like and, worried, starts upstairs. What is Karkat doing that he can’t feed his lusus? Is he not here?

As Sollux ascends the stairs, he comes face to face with a ripped, tangled mess of wires. Picking his way around the wires, he turns into Karkat’s respiteblock and is hit with the smell of blood like a punch to the face. Recoiling, he backs up a few steps, pulls his shirt over his nose, and goes inside.

Blood, freakishly red, is splashed over the walls like paint. It’s obviously several days old—dried and darkened and smelling of rot. It coats the floor and everything in the block. It swirls with the sopor and has fried the husktop. There’s too much blood for any troll to survive. There’s no body anywhere, though. Sollux stares in horror and revulsion before bolting from the block, ready to be sick.

On the far wall, scratched into the particleblock-board and shadowed by red-blood-paint are the words,

_Til death do us part._


End file.
